


For a While

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Original Work, Tonight Will Be Fine - Leonard Cohen (Song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-14 12:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14769716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: An inventory of love.





	For a While

**Author's Note:**

  * For [telm_393](https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/gifts).



> I know from your eyes  
> And I know from your smile  
> That tonight will be fine  
> For a while
> 
> \- Leonard Cohen

An inventory of love:

* There's a dimple in her cheek when she laughs. It was there the day they met, on that quiet mid-morning in Costa when he looked up from his coffee and book at the infectious sound of her cackling behind the counter at something on her friend's phone. When she caught him looking she shut up, pressing her lips together firmly, but the laughter was still trapped there in her bright watering eyes and the way the dimple flickered in and out of being as she fought herself not to start giggling again. Even when she's not smiling he knows it's there: when he wakes up in the night now six years later and she's sleeping beside him with her long hair a wild tangle taking over both their pillows and her face slack and peaceful, he could reach for her and touch that invisible spot as though there's a red X drawn on her cheek marking the hidden treasure of her happiness.

* "Just shush and listen to this," she told him when he went round one time and found her sprawled on a pink tartan blanket in her mum's back garden drinking cans of berry cider and soaking up the lingering remains of the late summer sun. He shushed obligingly and lay next to her with his head resting on the warm tanned skin of her thigh, feeling the frayed hem of her denim shorts tickling his cheek. He took the headphones she offered him, and for thirty-six minutes listened to what she told him was her favourite album from first piano note to the final fade out. He'd never done that before, listened to music with the same single-minded intensity as watching a film or reading a novel - it was always just background noise, or something to tunelessly sing along to in the car or pogo about to at gigs in sweaty little venues - but there were four or five times when something about the music or something about the words made a shiver of goosebumps thrill up the full length of his spine. Every time she noticed the hair rise on his arms he felt her touch her fingertips lightly to his shoulder like she was saying _I know. Me too._ And when it finished he wanted to thank her, because it felt like a present - like she'd dug something secret and private out of herself and wrapped it in ribbon for him to study like the things he put between slides under his microscope at college.

* When he turned twenty-one his parents bought him a bottle of whisky from the year he was born and a ton of sensible grown-up things, some nice shirts for job interviews and a rice cooker for his flat and a plain blue duvet cover set because they were horrified to discover he only had his old Leicester City Football Club one with faded foxes all over it and half the pop studs missing. His mates mostly got him beer and Amazon wishlist books. But she gave him a postcode scribbled on a bit of notepaper to tap into his satnav, and sat quietly beside him looking pale and a bit sick for the full fortyish miles to the airfield where she'd booked him in to tick off the tandem skydive at the top of his bucket list as a surprise. "I can't watch," she told him when they pulled up in the car park and he realised what was going on. "I'm gonna wait in here, you know what I'm like about planes. But"--and the dimple appeared again, a quick nervous little flicker at the side of her mouth--"the guy's really nice, he said he'll try to land on the bottom if the parachute fucks up. Then I got a tenner discount for almost fainting. I know how much you want this. I want you to have it."

* She sang badly in the car and the shower and any time she was tipsy within five hundred yards of a karaoke machine - even worse than him, which was a remarkable achievement - and when she danced she moved her limbs and head and swaying hips in places that didn't even come close to matching the beat, but none of that meant anything, none of it mattered at all. She sang and danced exactly the same way she did the things she was brilliant at, like those abstract paintings on huge canvases that took up an entire wall of her mum's empty garage - with a vibrant, unfettered, glorious sort of freedom. He envied that for a while, until somehow it seeped through his pores and into his bloodstream just from proximity to her and he began to live the same way. But he loved too how she was happy in his silences, and he was happy in hers. Loved her hands with their chewed, glitter-painted fingernails sliding over the back of his in the moments before bed, showing him silently with touches and glances in the dressing table mirror how to plait her hair into the pigtails she sometimes wore to sleep in. Loved her habit of nudging her reading glasses up the slope of her nose with her middle knuckle when they were curled together on the sofa sharing a blanket and a six-pack of beer and each other's favourite books. Loved the pink sparkly emoji heart she favoured at the end of every text instead of punctuation. Loved everything, every single tiny little thing, as fiercely as the huge important things.

* He even loved it when things between them started to wind down, though it was a different kind of love. A bit wistful, the way you feel when the leaves start to turn orange in the autumn, but a curious and unexpected undertone of excitement somewhere at the bottom of everything else, like the pea under the princess's stack of mattresses. Things were changing, not ending, and he wondered how different life would be for them this time next year, and what about them wouldn't change at all.

"I'm seriously thinking about it, you know," she said. She was dangling upside-down from a tree branch, hooked onto it by the back of her bent knees. "Oh fuck, catch me, I'm gonna break my neck--" He grabbed her round the waist, fumbling her when she tried to flip upright so they crumpled together in an ungainly, giggling heap beside the remains of their picnic. "Art school," she clarified, like she needed to. Like he and her mum and all their friends hadn't been telling her for years she should be there instead of making coffee for people who barely looked up from their phones for long enough to order. "Been saving up all this time. I mean, I know we were gonna use it for a house deposit, but..."

She went quiet then, holding his hand, tracing her fingertip across the bumps of his knuckles. When she finally looked up at him he could see in the steadiness of her eyes that she wasn't waiting for his blessing, and he was glad about that. He wanted to give it to her anyway, and maybe she knew it because she smiled the way she did on the first day he met her and leaned in to kiss him softly, lingering.

"We're alright, aren't we?"

"Yeah," he said, because they were, and would be, whatever happened next.


End file.
